Show me the money: is grant writing taking over science?

Experiments are being put on the back burner – future discoveries may be scuppered by administrative overload

I spend my time writing, instead of supervising experiments and getting science done

Science is an art.

In my particular field, cell biology, the doing of science is a blend of rote precision and creative improvisation. If this sounds like a clash, consider a cook in her kitchen. She may usually follow a recipe to the letter, but occasionally, through tweaking, trial, and sometimes error, she works out how to improve it. Like chocolate-stained index cards you might have inherited from your grandmother and mother, a decent lab recipe will be passed to the newbie, annotated and bequeathed, slightly modified, to the next generation. (Some of my favorite lab recipes, photocopied repeatedly and stored in an ancient plastic folder, are scribbled all over and smeared with stains and dyes – and at least one has become splattered with radioactive isotope.)

It's well known in lab lore that some researchers have the "knack" – a green thumb, a golden pipette, some propensity to get better results than a person laboring next door with the same starting materials and the same recipe. It's probably the same reason why my Victoria sponge always comes out as dense as a neutron star, while my partner's is light and fluffy and precisely as Delia intended.

As you progress in your career, the doing of science is largely relegated to younger trainees, and the bigger picture – the thinking about science – becomes increasingly important. No less an artist, the leader of a research team must teach the trainees her favorite recipes, coordinate their physical efforts into a coherent strategy, and help them analyze their results, always staying one step ahead of what others in the field are doing and keeping an eye on the ever-shifting landscape of the project. As theories rise and fall, as celebrated experiments refuse to be replicated in others' labs, as rumors of new ideas and new techniques spread like brushfire, the lab head must keep the whole show running smoothly.

All of this takes a surprising amount of time and energy, and the more people you have working for you, the more time and energy it takes. Unfortunately, these efforts have to be juggled alongside other tasks; if you're in a university, you probably have teaching obligations, and various committees and other administrative tasks. But by far the biggest time-suck is the writing of research grants.

In the UK, there has been an increasing trend away from funding projects towards funding people – specifically, "excellent" people. Excellence is easy to assess if you've been around a while and have a track record; so funding excellent people will tend to have the effect of perpetuating pre-existing success. But how does a younger scientist with a shorter track record, whose "excellence" might not yet be apparent, get his first grant? It must be a lot like getting your first break as a popular musician – except unlike a bloke with a guitar, scientists can't film themselves on YouTube performing experiments in their bedroom to garner a reputation. Instead, they need grant money to produce the results that get turned into papers, which in turn prove their excellence – but without the grant, they'll never get off the ground in the first place.

With dwindling funds in the UK devoted to research, British scientists are spending a lot of time trying to secure what's left to keep their research groups alive. I personally spend about a third of my time writing for grants, fellowships and PhD studentships – which is time I cannot spend helping to foster the ongoing experiments. I've had a few funding successes, but not enough to wholly suspend the feverish activity needed to optimize my research performance. I've had to postpone entire promising side shoots of the project because there is not enough time or resources to do them credit. I am by no means alone – my colleagues are similarly holed up in their offices, churning out application after application in the hopes of getting lucky. Even the so-called "excellent" folks are, I hear, suffering from rejections in the current climate. (These reports are anecdotal, but if you want to contribute to Science Is Vital's survey on the topic, we might get a better idea of the extent of the problem and whether it is indeed getting worse in these times of austerity.)

There is some evidence that having the vast majority of scientists spend the vast majority of their time writing grants instead of doing and thinking science might be a tad inefficient, and not, perhaps, the best way to get science done. A recent correspondence in Nature about the Australian system, for example, reported that collectively, in 2012, researchers spent "more than five centuries' worth of time" writing or revising grants for the major funding scheme; as only 20.5% were successful, this accounts for a staggering four centuries' worth of wasted time.

It's not just time; it's money too. Canadian researchers calculated that the cost of administering a major national grant scheme in 2007 exceeded what it would cost simply to give every qualified researcher $30,000, no questions asked. Closer to home, a pair of researchers here in the UK used a computer model to study the system of competitive grant writing and also concluded that we'd likely have the same amount of scientific output if research funds were awarded at random – saving an enormous amount of time in the process. The authors say:

Academics, both in our model and most likely in reality, are caught in a kind of tragedy of the commons: their individually rational efforts to write a convincing proposal that gains them a slice of the funding pie lead to an equilibrium in which the research output of the system as a whole goes down.

I wonder if there is a better way to fund and do science than our current system? Unfortunately, I don't have any time to ponder this; I've got another grant due.

Post-script: If you want to encourage the Government to continue supporting great UK science, please visit the Science is Vital petition and consider signing it.

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